The hostility of this rhetoric often conflated the organizers with the attendees, who were primarily female and queer teens, many of whom were local and attending their first con. The largest concentration of this rhetoric is the Dashcon tag and user reblogs spread it quickly; one early Tumblr post – reblogged over 67,000 times – characterized con-goers as “white kids in flower crowns rioting for the anti-sexualization of women in media while holding panels about homoerotic subtext.” Comments on other social media sites like Jezebel swiftly adopted this derisive tone, describing attendees as “dorks who live in their parents’ basement” or “hormonal teenagers who enjoy drama way too much” in contrast to the “mature” fans on Tumblr “who discuss theories.”  Such misinformed and misogynist discourse was accompanied by paternalistic horror about the possible exposure of teenagers to an informational 18+ BDSM panel.

As a counter to this discourse, I want to highlight some of the more productive social and cultural aspects and implications of the con. For attendees, it is a vital safe space for self-expression and community bonding, intellectual engagement, counseling, and social empowerment for attendees. In turn, the implicit discomfort and hostility directed at them reveals how this space threatens social hierarchies regarding, in particular, female sexual pleasure and knowledge, “feminine” cultural production, “mass” tastes, and non-normative sexual/gender identities and practices.

I attended DashCon because I am interested in the way social media sites, particularly Tumblr, and their related cons provide young female and queer fans the opportunity to fulfill social, emotional, and educational needs that more traditional institutions do not. Last year, I participated in a series of articles for Antenna about LeakyCon, an established convention with a similar demographic. The advanced publicity of DashCon indicated a related agenda, with a “social issues” track of panels devoted to overlapping concerns of Tumblr users, including feminist politics and mass media representation, LGBTQA support, social justice concerns, mental health care and, ironically, ways to combat online hate and bullying. I enlisted a couple of con-goers who were also media studies students, and we shared the coverage of various panels and activities (although these observations are mine alone).

The most visible way DashCon created a safe space for female self-expression was the community’s respectful treatment of its many cosplayers. In cosplay, attendees dress as their favorite media characters, often spending days creating costumes. Because attendees respected the maxim that “cosplay is not consent,” they did not touch or take photos of cosplayers without their explicit permission. Veteran cosplayers often noted with relief how unmolested they felt at DashCon compared to mixed-sex cons where they are often groped.

In addition to cosplaying, the activities of this con followed others of its type, and included games, singalongs, autograph signings, fan art sales, as well as panels. The “social issues” and media analysis panels frequently overlapped in content and politics. Media fans, especially in this demographic, are often already engaged in trying to locate alternatives to dominant ideologies through media texts, and DashCon attendees were eager to analyze the social aspects of media culture. My colleague Paul Booth has called fandom, “the classroom of your life” and it certainly had that role at DashCon, where attendees were able to learn about topics that are still largely not covered in high school or even college classrooms, where gender and queer studies are rarely integrated into the curriculum as a whole.

The panelists, a combination of academics, activists, and/or social media specialists, embraced more radical rather than liberal political positions, drawing on many aspects of queer theory and critical race theory as well as media studies. Media analysis panels emphasized the importance and lack of strong female characters, queer characters, and characters of color, and the discussion leaders were able to personally speak to these issues as well as offer strategies to advocate for more diverse representation. Straight and queer women’s investment in male/male “slash” pairings was addressed in nuanced ways tied to, for example, the lack of equivalent development of female characters.

The panelists crucially tied media production to larger social structures, noting that “people blame the media, but these are institutional problems, social hierarchies that get represented by the media. There is no villain in the tower.” Instead, they emphasized the importance of education, an understanding of historical context and change, and an appreciation of the intersectionality of identity. Panels about contemporary feminism offered both scholarly analysis and an opportunity for young women to share their stories and concerns.

The rape culture panel, for example, began by asserting that instead of telling women how to avoid rape, we as a society should instead be focusing on teaching men and boys not to rape, a message that is prevalent on Tumblr but rarely appears in the mainstream.

All the panelists, while critical of DashCon’s management, have noted how impressed they were – as was I – with the engagement and thoughtful questions of the attendees. They have also tried to debunk misinformation, noting, for examples, the racial as well as gender/queer diversity of panels and attendees, and protesting their misrepresentation and the attacks on them.

This con provided young people with an opportunity to further expand the alternative communities that Tumblr offers them. While its larger problems are disappointing, DashCon’s grassroots project should be appreciated for what it did accomplish despite its organizers and attendees’ lack of social power and resources. Other attendees felt the same. Panelist Brin posted a video of her participation in the LGBTQ&A panel (below) and another con-goer posted that he found its cost was “a small price against my first time truly feeling in a community of people who would love and understand me with almost no effort at all.”

Facebook page for “Peter Capaldi is the 12th doctor fan girls get over it.”

When Peter Capaldi was unveiled as the new Doctor Who in August, The Daily Mail reported an “ageism row” as fans purportedly dubbed Peter Capaldi “’too old’ to play the Time Lord.” Although The Daily Mail cited negative responses from both male and female viewers and included positive responses from female fans, the negative responses were quickly ascribed in much of the press, and on social media, to “fangirls.” Witness the Facebook page, “Peter Capaldi is the 12th doctor fan girls get over it.” In claiming that fangirls alone were critical of the choice of the new Doctor, people simultaneously dismissed fangirls as lesser fans than male fans or “true” Whovians, and assumed that fangirl interest in the show was exclusively romantic or sexual, that Capaldi was seen negatively because he was not as erotically attractive as recent actors David Tennant, or Matt Smith. This, despite such fangirl reactions as the YouTube video “Peter Capaldi is the new Doctor! (A fangirl’s thoughts on this),” posted immediately after the announcement in which the self-identified fangirl says she is “glad it is not a younger guy. I am tired of these plot lines between the Doctor and his companions and all this… sexual tension.” As L.B. Gale writes in his online essay “In Defense of Doctor Who Fangirls,” “The assumption behind this ‘true Who fans’ conversation is that the ‘true fans’ are the geeky men who were able to get the ‘big ideas about humanity’ behind the show while the fair weather fans were all the little girls who were just pornographically enjoying the series because of how good looking Smith and Tennant are” The dismissal of fangirls is familiar to those of us who study pop culture as a stereotypical denigration of feminized mass culture in opposition to masculine “art.” It assumes that female fans are an add-on, derivative, and lesser than male fandom, which is assumed to be motivated by more serious interests (e.g., the vagaries of time travel vs. the appeal of TV stars).

In opposition, I would like to suggest that fangirls are not one fandom among many, or an add-on to the Whovian empire, but the ur-fans of Doctor Who, the original targeted audience and point of identification within the show. Jill Lepore’s recent New Yorker essay on Doctor Who (“The Man in the Box: Fifty Years of Doctor Who”) makes clear that capturing a female audience was essential to the show’s original plan. When Sydney Newman, then head of BBC drama, decided to produce a science fiction series, he commissioned a report that argued against doing so: the report claimed that sci-fi was not only too American, but also, and more problematically, too unappealing to women. Intending to create a “loyalty program” that people would watch every week, and one that would appeal to women as much as men, Newman decided to “flout the genre’s conventions.” Newman hired Verity Lambert, the only female producer at the BBC, and together they determined that the Doctor should have a female companion to “add feminine interest.” Thus, the companion provides a relay for female viewers, a point of identification within the show.

Given the companions’ penchant for crushing on the Doctor, at least in the recent series (“all that sexual tension” the fangirl YouTube video cites), is it any surprise that young women might identify with Rose, Martha, Donna, Amy, and Clara? All of whom, except perhaps Donna, at one point or another kiss and/or flirt with the Doctor. The companion is a built-in fangirl, one who encounters the Doctor accidentally, but once let into the Tardis (bigger on the inside, like a TV, as Lepore notes) commits to a “loyalty program” of traveling with him, leaving her everyday life behind (even bringing her boyfriend along for the ride in the case of Martha and Amy) – a life that Keara Goin says in her previous Antenna blog in this series is “made to seem secondary, bland, and lacking excitement.”

Osgood (Ingrid Oliver) in “The Day of the Doctor.”

The importance of the fangirl to the series, and her embeddedness within it, was reaffirmed in the 50th anniversary “The Day of the Doctor.” This episode featured among its characters a young geeky girl, Osgood (Ingrid Oliver), wearing the fourth Doctor’s scarf like a cos-playing fangirl, and enthusing over the Doctor, whose exploits she has studied. In this special episode, former companion Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) plays the Time Lord’s “conscience,” and wittily describes the basic premise of the series when she notes that he is “stuck between a girl and a box – story of your life, eh Doctor?” Here, the Doctor’s conscience reminds us that the fangirl fantasy is not external to the show but stitched into the fabric of the narrative, the essential story of the Doctor.

Nonetheless, while fangirls have been ascribed a certain role within the narrative and as spectators, fangirls have veered from the plot in fascinating ways. Looking around on tumblr, the fangirl epicenter, one finds numerous sites dedicated to Doctor Who. In addition to cute images of Tennant and Smith, or fantasy “ships” (or fan fantasy relationships) of the Doctor and his companion, there were images of Daleks, GIFs that celebrated reading (quoting the Doctor’s claim that books are the “best weapons in the world”), and archival images detailing the history of the show and sorting its timey-wimey logic. There are frequent gay “ships” related to the Tennant’s Doctor and captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), auteurist links between Steven Moffat’s Sherlock and his Doctor Who episodes in queer Sherlock “ships” between Sherlock and Watson or Sherlock and the Doctor, or pages that juxtapose fandoms for Harry Potter, Supernatural, The Hobbit, and more. Assuming that fangirl activity is limited to expressions of heterosexual attachment to young actors denies the range and complexity of these responses. It is a misplaced fantasy about the girl’s proper place in the Whovian universe.

Doctor Who Official 50th Celebration in London, 2013.

For Doctor Who the fiftieth anniversary, as Matt Hills has described, is not just a way of marking a milestone for the television series, but also an “epic collision between fandom and brand management.” This collision can be seen not just in the way the BBC releases minisodes to appeal to fans in a fashion that Hills has called “trans-transmedia,” but also in the many in-person celebrations being held at the anniversary. These celebrations have taken many guises: from professionally-run, BBC-organized affairs, to academic conferences (the report of which Derek Kompare has nicely written), to fan/scholar celebrations of Doctor Who, to fan–run conventions, to record-breaking cinema extravaganzas, to fan-oriented screening parties, the sheer number of fan celebrations demonstrate the continued affective and communal power of a cult television franchise like Doctor Who.

Chicago TARDIS convention.

This past weekend (November 28–December 1), I attended (and presented at) Chicago TARDIS, a local fan-run convention with over 2,500 attendees, 30 guests, and 160 panels and events. Chicago TARDIS manifests the collision between fandom and branding. The panels at Chicago TARDIS included both professional actor/crew presentations (three original Doctors were present, as were a number of companions and ancillary content creators), while also featuring more fan-oriented panels like “Fangirls are Real Fans, Too,” “The Danger of Fandom Entitlement,” and “Heroes (or Chumps?) of Cosplay.”

TARDIS has been running under that name for 13 years, and emerged after the demise of HME/Visions, a Chicago area Doctor Who convention that ran from 1990­–1998. In her book The Doctor Who Franchise, Lynette Porter describes how “some guests prefer” attending smaller events like TARDIS or other fan-run US conventions like Gallifrey One and Hurricane Who, “because they provide that personal touch and are smaller, less stressful events” (151). Although fans of Doctor Who have met informally since the beginning of the show, organized fan conventions for Doctor Who started in earnest in the UK on Saturday 6th August 1977, with the Doctor Who Appreciation Society’s convention, later named Panopticon. The first US convention was held in December 1979, with Fourth Doctor Tom Baker and producer Graham Williams in attendance (there because of the last minute cancellation of the production of Shada).

Program from the first Doctor Who convention in the U.S., 1979.

Doctor Who fan conventions are different than Doctor Who exhibitions, as Philip Sandifer describes. In her chapter on the Doctor Who Experience in Cardiff Bay, Melissa Beattie points out the exhibition has served not only to revitalize Cardiff, but also to reinforce the dominant, commercial meanings of Who. Indeed, unlike fan-run conventions like Chicago TARDIS, more official, BBC-sanctioned events tend to seem “much more like a traditional museum with… displays and structures,” according to Beattie (178). The famous Doctor Who Exhibition in Longleat or the Doctor Who Exhibition in Blackpool were both long-running museums of Doctor Who props, monsters, and memorabilia.

Doctor Who Exhibition in Blackpool, UK.

In general, professionally-run conventions like the Doctor Who Experience or the BBC’s own 50^th anniversary celebration tend to reinforce the dominant readings of the show with panels articulating authorized behind-the-scenes information or discussion with actors and crew. In contrast, smaller, more fan-run conventions tend to allow a plurality of voices, with panels discussing fannish activities like “Fandom Culture Clash” and “You Know You’re a Doctor Who Fan When…” That being said, many fan-run conventions also have crew and special guests in attendance, and many feature fan-friendly fare. There may also be a UK/US difference in convention styles, and the line between guest and participant is often more blurred at fan-run conventions.  According to Zubernis and Larsen’s Fandom at the Crossroads, more corporate organizations like Creation Entertainment tend to reinforce the barrier between fan and celebrity, even while simultaneously seeming to erase it. At Chicago TARDIS, interaction with guests is less regulated and often happens seemingly on accident – in the hotel bar, in the lobby while waiting for a cab, even walking across the street to Target (last year I literally ran into Sarah Jane Adventures actress Anjli Mohindra while making my way through the hotel doors).

As we commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who, it’s important to recognize that meeting in-person to celebrate the show is nothing new. Many Doctor Who conventions are now decades old. 2013 may mark a higher level of visibility for the program than ever before, but its fans have met for decades before now. What is different today is what Hills notes of TV anniversary celebrations: they “take on different meanings within reconfigured industry/audience contexts” (p. 217). Fan conventions are similar, and the annual consistency of conventions allows them to take on new dimensions. Unprecedented levels of access to behind-the-scenes news, celebrity personal lives, and production details make professional conventions often a reiteration rather than a revelation of information.

Meanwhile, the growing popularity of fan-run celebrations seems to be developing just as social media and the web provide copious avenues for fans to meet and congregate online. In my own research on Doctor Who fan conventions, I found that, for many fans, coming to Chicago TARDIS was less about meeting guests and more like “a family reunion,” where they could see the friends that “got” each other’s quirks. That TARDIS is always the weekend of Thanksgiving increases its familial quality: Thanksgiving is to celebrate with our family, to relax by the hearth, and to enjoy the company of those – and the shows – we love. The fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who may now be behind us, but like the Doctor himself, they will continue to develop and regenerate for many years to come – and, judging by these cosplayers, below, the future is assured.

Cosplay. (Photo Credit: Jef Burnham)

Paul Booth wishes to thank Ian Peters and Jennifer Adams Kelly for providing information about TARDIS and background on Doctor Who conventions in general, as well as for their help in the early stages of this post.

This is the fifth post in The Cultural Lives of Doctor Who, Antenna’s series commemorating the television franchise’s fiftieth anniversary and its lasting cultural legacy. Click here to read the previous entries in the series. Stay tuned for Piers Britton’s upcoming entry on the costuming in “The Name of the Doctor” this Thursday, December 5.

Booth babe or cosplayer? Gamer Jessica Nigri dresses up for E3.

What a year it was for female gamers, geeks and nerds. The Internet was ablaze, especially during the summer months, over ill-considered tweets, Facebook rants, opinion columns, and harassing flash games that policed women and girls’ participation in traditionally male popular culture. In case you missed it, I’m referring to controversies in game and comic book communities that marked 2012 as the year of misogyny in geek culture. Critical attention to this issue is coming from game and media studies scholars, as well as courageous members of these fan communities. In this post, I add my take on all this misogyny by considering how “the booth babe” contributed to a backlash against female fandom.

It all started long ago, though no one is sure exactly when and where. The brief history of booth babes appearing in The Atlantic, notes the first appearance of spokesmodels at the inaugural Consumer Electronics Show in 1967. However, the use of female promotional models to sell technology is linked to the mid-20^th century automobile show and became an international phenomenon, repeated at trade shows around the world. Promotional models are common at expositions for construction tools, audio equipment, guns, cycling paraphernalia, cell phones, cameras, video games, computers, and much more.

The stereotypical booth babe is a temporary employee, hired for event-specific work, which requires standing for hours handing out promotional material and encouraging attendees to approach the product booth. The promotional model is most often, though not exclusively, a woman, and she tends to wear revealing clothing. Or, as demonstrated at the HyperMac booth last week at CES, body paint.

Booth babes may also don costumes worn by characters from the fictional worlds of games, anime, and comics. And thus, like so many female characters from these worlds, often wears Spandex, plate-metal bikinis, or ripped shorts and torn tanks. Photos of booth babes are among the most popular images that emerge from trade show and convention coverage, particularly on fan sites and industry blogs.

During CES 2012, the BBC posted a video about booth babes, which brought the first wave of attention to the phenomenon last year. The video moved swiftly through the Internet, due, in part, to dismissive comments from the president of the Consumer Electronic Association.

In June, game designer and 30-year industry veteran, Brenda Braithwaite, called out Senior Vice President of the Electronic Software Association, Rich Taylor, when she tweeted her dismay at the continued presence of booth babes at the Electronic Entertainment Expo:

“I dread heading off to work at E3 today….It is as if I walked into a strip club w/o intending to. These are the policies of @e3expo and @RichatESA. I feel uncomfortable in an industry I helped found.”

Short-lived attempts to ban booth babes have been made before. The women tech writers appearing in the BBC video and Braithwaite’s tweets provided a much-needed critique of an industrial practice that perpetuates a “boys-only” culture in gaming and technology, and does little to assuage gendered employment and wage discrimination. These moments, and others from last year, reenergized a conversation that deserves sustained attention, organized response, and formal policy changes. However, as summer heated up, the conversation suffered a melt down.

Late one night in June, Destructiod writer Ryan Perez questioned Felicia “Queen Geek” Day’s credibility in a (supposedly alcohol-fueled) tweet: “Does Felicia Day matter at all? I mean does she actually contribute anything useful to this industry, besides retaining a geek persona?” Adding, “Could you [Day] be considered nothing more than a glorified booth babe? You don’t seem to add anything creative to the medium.”

Perez’s Twitter feed was flooded by furious Day supporters, including Wil “King Geek” Wheton, who called Perez an “ignorant misogynist” and demanded Destructiod fire him. They did.

A month after Perez lost his job, Joe Peacock wrote an opinion piece for CNN.com, titled “Booth Babes Need Not Apply,” in which he conflated hired promotional models with female cosplayers. Peacock was apparently disgusted by these “poachers,” claiming “they’re a pox on our culture.”

In November, comic book illustrator Tony Harris ranted on Facebook about “COSPLAY-Chicks” who, in his analysis, are only “quasi-pretty-NOT-hot” and know nothing about comic books. Central to Peacock and Harris’ comments, is the assumption that they have a super power to discern the real female fan from the fake female fan, and the booth babe from the cosplayer.

What these three moments (and many others from last year) reveal is a palatable anxiety from certain dark corners of geek culture. The increased presence of women at cons and expos has sparked a misogynistic backlash. Female cosplayers experience sexual harassment at cons, and are accused of being “attention whores” whose fan knowledge is questioned. Women working in games, comics, and technology attending trade shows are often presumed to be promotional models, and find their creative contributions to the industry dismissed. Standing in the center of this backlash is the booth babe, a misunderstood and misrepresented chimera. She has become a convenient amalgamation and target of many parts of geek culture’s gender problem. It is time to figure her out.